Thing #1

In searching for information about book trailers, I found some interesting things. There is not much information beyond a definiton anywhere but online. Once I moved to searching online, I had tons of hits! I used Bing, Dogpile, and Lycos to look for examples and how-tos. Every one of them hit on wikipedia for the definition of a book trailer. Bing gave me the best information to use by and with kids when making a trailer. There were more examples and several how-to pages. My favorite instructional site is from eHow. The step-by step instructions are easy to follow and are good with PC or Mac. There were also hits that led to book trailers made by and for kids. My favorite site is this one, which appears to be coordinated by a university. I also came across several teacher-made sites or blogs with rubrics for assessing book trailers. My favorite one is simple, but seems to cover everything I think I would need at the elementary level. The results from Dogpile reflected more of a professional light. The ones that came up first were geared more to authors making their own trailers or having someone else do it for them. A good example of this came from Darcy Pattison. It has great instructions and links to more information, but I think it is much more advanced than I need right now. Lycos was visually appealing, but didn't give any new results. It had the same sites that the other two had.

I really like the way Lycos looks, but I liked the results that Bing gave me. Dogpile seemed more for professional use and not so much for education. I intend to use it again and try a different topic to see if I feel the same way then. This is a great activity for me because I almost always use Google. I need to "get out more" and try the others more often. I also need to encourage my staff and students to do the same. Changing things up a little is good!

I don't know that I was surprised by this, but I found a good number of book trailers were on YouTube and TeacherTube or they were imbedded in blogs done by teachers and librarians. I'm still trying to decide where to put my own book trailers. There are so many options, but I really want to make it easy for the kids to find them. I have some thinking to do!

Bringing it All Together

I've thought long and hard about what to do for this project and I decided to do what I want to do! I am not as comfortable with iMovie as I would like to be before school starts, so my end product will be an iMovie. I am going to attempt to do a book trailer. My goal beyond this lesson is to get kids excited about books available in the library and for them to be able to share their love of a particular title by using iMovie to create book trailers. And maybe even show some of the teachers another way to do a report, whether it's an old-fashioned book report or a report on a Native American tribe. I think the kids will be way more excited about presenting their information using technology and I think the other kids will be more attentive to a movie than a posterboard project. As for the TEKS, there are so many ways to go with something like this. It covers most of the technology TEKS, with possibilities of language arts, science, math, and social studies coming right along with it, depending on the topic the students choose or are assigned.